And all at once, spring is here! It got up to seventy degrees today, and all the snow is gone. Nothing much is growing yet, but the grass has turned from greyish-brown back to something resembling greenish. Can’t wait to take a nice long bike ride tomorrow.
Jeannie and I just got back from a trip to Chicago. The main purpose of the trip was to go to CoCon, the Chicago Origami Convention. We went four years ago and had a great time, so we decided to do it again. We flew out Thursday morning to give us a couple days to go sightseeing before the convention started. To me Chicago has a great vibe, somehow combining the best of New York City and Buffalo. The first day we went to the Adler Planetarium. It was pretty cool. It had some shows in the dome including a tour of the solar system and the current state of big astronomy in Chile, plus a bunch of exhibits including a Gemini capsule. After that we walked around the shore of Lake Michigan for a little while. It was a strangely foggy day. We ended up at the Field Museum if Natural History, home of the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex Sue. We went there last time we were in Chicago, but it was so cool we figured we’d go back, being right next door the planetarium and all. They had a bunch of other cool exhibits, including one documenting melting glaciers around the world. And I must say, as a former exhibit designer, whoever does the exhibits there does and amazing job! That evening we walked around downtown near our hotel and got genuine Chicago-style pizza.
Friday we went to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. This was a pretty amazing place. Lots of stuff about transportation, trains, airplanes, etc. The have an entire World War II U-Boat that was captured toward the end of the war, and brought the place in the 1950’s. You can take a guided tour inside. There’s also an exhibit that’s a re-creation of a coal mine, taking you thru the history of mining machinery for the last hundred and twenty years. One had a giant model train diorama that demonstrated to role of rail in the cycle raw materials, heavy manufacturing, the distribution of goods, and travel. Elsewhere was an entire train from the F.D.R. era, an early high-speed streamline passenger train made of stainless steel. For me one of the highlights was a 1929 Duesenberg J automobile. It’s my favorite car of all time and I built several models of them as a kid. I’ve never seen one in person before. They’re surprisingly huge! We wanted to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art too, but I guess that’ll hafta wait for next time.
Friday evening was the start of the convention. I set up my exhibit, which did not include any really large models since I had fly with it in my luggage, in the largest box that would fit in my backpack, and spent the rest of the evening catching up with my origami friends. A bunch of us went to the Irish pub around the corner from the hotel later on. Saturday and Sunday I taught several classes, including one for my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, another for my Platypus, and a third for my single-sheet polyhedron Semi-Sunken Icosahedron. Whew! I also took a couple classes, including one on making masks and faces by wetfolding thick watercolor paper, and another on a human figure model. This got my creative juices flowing. In evening folding I designed a human figure from a pentagon, since the human form has five major appendages. The idea has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but the folding was pretty spontaneous, and it turned out surprisingly well. I’m thinking of it as a base, and plan to fold a few more figures and bring out different kinds of character in them. I was experimenting more with faces, trying to come up with a good pattern for a face bass so the features line up in the correct place and in good proportion, and also to incorporate things like cheeks, jawlines and brow ridges to make it more lifelike. On the way home I got the idea to try a face out of pentagon too.
After classes Jeannie and took a walk to Daly Plaza, where they have that Picasso, and the next day out the end of Navy Pier, where there’s a statue of Bob Newhart of all people. By Sunday the weather was starting to turn nice. It was sunny and warm-ish, but very windy out on the lake.
Now I’m a folding mood, and have started in on a new version of my semi-sunken dodecahedron. Want to have some new stuff the show at the next couple conventions.
I can bring you up to speed on the music scene too. My Spellbound project is at the phase where I’m listening back to mixes of the first six songs, and they all sound pretty great. There’s still one more song to go, but there’s alot of work ahead on that one so I think I may downshift on it for a while to make more time to do origami in the next few months. Meanwhile, I successfully got my two audio interfaces working together to form a single sixteen-track studio! This is a pretty big accomplishment. Next rehearsal we’re gonna do here and hopefully it’ll all go smoothly on the tech side and we can focus on getting comfortable jamming with the setup. After that we have a couple regular rehearsals for a gig coming up at the end of March. We’ll use that time to sharpen up our originals and pick which songs we want to record. So we’re looking at setting up some recording sessions in April. We’ll keep you posted as to how the situation shapes up.
